Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at March 29th, 2005

I’m currently in the midst of creating a role playing game/campaign. This entails coming up with a story and game mechanics that encourage the creation of that sort of story.

So what’s the game about?
Players play the staff of Earth’s first embassy to a huge, star-spanning, millenia old society. Soon after they arrive at the embassy, the empire begins to dissolve.

Earth’s government has no illusions about the precarious state of things. The players have two simultaneous missions. First, they are responsible to do what embassies always do–represent their government to another government. Second (and perhaps more importantly), they’re responsible to acquire all the knowlege and technology they can (i.e. take anything they can get away with).

Thematically I imagine the campaign hitting a few of the following themes:
1. Responsibility to your group/yourself vs. responsibility to the larger society.
2. Revenge vs. appropriate reparations
3. Free will vs. determinism

The tough part is going from these intentions to game mechanics. I could just go straight to using the Pool, but though I like it, I think I’d like to do something a little more particular to this background.

Prepare to see a bit more on this in the next few days.

Posted by Jim at March 28th, 2005

I’m not particularly enthusiastic about do it yourself projects unless they involve computer programs or role playing games. My wife, on the other hand is very enthusiastic about do it yourself projects that “improve” our house.

At the risk of marital discord, I’ll explain why. First of all, though I do have some understanding of how to use tools, I don’t have much of an urge to build things. On a practical level, this means that I come to any home improvement project with a completely blank slate and a deep fear of hurting either the house or myself.

The fact that most home improvement projects seem to involve electricity does little to dispel my fear.

Two examples of memorable past home improvement projects:
1. I am busy with school. Kristen decides that we have had a broken light in the kitchen for far too long. She removes the old light from the ceiling and tries to put the new light in, but, the wires coming down from the ceiling just won’t stay twisted together with the wires from the new kitchen light. She asks me for help. Hours later, I have finished, having unintentionally taken over the entire project. And then I’ve still got schoolwork to do.

2. It is fall. Things are just beginning to cool down for the year. Kristen buys a new computerized thermostat which allows us to set warm temperatures for when we’re supposed to be home and cold ones for when we’re gone. This is a wonderful idea. She turns off the power and begins, taking off the old thermostat and beginning to install a new one.

Unfortunately, the old wires that come out of the wall (and I mean old in the sense of having cloth rather than plastic outer coverings) don’t twist very well either and tend to break off when you attempt to attach them to the thermostat. This problem is compounded by the fact that they aren’t long enough to reach the point where they’re supposed to connect to the thermostat to begin with. As an added bonus, the process of taking the old thermostat off makes it impossible to put it back up.

I end up taking over the project, taking the day off from work to do it. This means that I twist extensions onto the wires, watch the wires break, learn how to twist the wires very carefully, and finally make things work after making 5 visits to the hardware store.

By the next week temperatures dipped into the 40’s.

I must now mention for those readers who happen to be my wife that there are many home improvement projects that Kristen has completed entirely without my help or assistance–including painting the living room, kitchen and dining room. It is also worth mentioning that the new thermostat has saved us several times it’s cost.

The fact that they really are improvements doesn’t stop me from dreading them.

This weekend Kristen intends to remove the tub surround and tile the bathroom. Tiling will be done with my mom’s assistance (she’s put up a lot of tile). I will end up removing the tub surround from the wall with help from Kristen’s father. I’ll also be involved in putting up the cement board that the tile will be placed on.

You can bet I’ll be looking forward to it.

Posted by Jim at March 24th, 2005

Every so often I meddle with my FreeBSD box. Usually I just use the FreeBSD box, but every so often I decide to add some programs, remove programs or upgrade things.

Sometimes this is a pleasant process, but sometimes it is a stepping stone to pain. Like tonight for example, I upgraded a library (never a good idea) only to find that it’s connected to Gnome and Xfree86 and thus (as you might guess) the FreeBSD box is now command line only.

I’m currently torn between total reinstallation or possibly trying to put the right version of the right library back onto the box. I suspect that reinstallation might be easier. Trouble is, I need to use cvs for my master’s project and I set up cvs on the FreeBSD box.

CVS (and all non-gui dependant programs) work just fine of course. Thus I’m tempted to leave the whole box alone until I’m finished with my masters. That or set up CVS on the Mac.

Too late to figure this one out now. I’m going to bed.

Posted by Jim at March 23rd, 2005

Not so long ago I was working on a master’s degree in sociology. Medical sociology interested me enough to take a course in it and also to work as a graduate assistant to one of the medical sociologists in the department.

Issues around human control of life and death (abortion, euthanasia, research into longevity) particularly interest me.

The Sociology of Technology and the End of Life
During the class I took, I had to write a term paper. I wanted to write about the effects of technology on the issue of euthanasia. For example, people in even the recent past could not be kept alive as they as they can now. You can keep a body alive long past the point at which consciousness ends. Similarly consciousness can still exist when the body is an utter wreck, incapable of communicating with the world around it. That sort of situation is bound to create new opportunities for society to develop its ideas about issues of life and death.

Alas, there wasn’t any research that directly applied. This would have been great if I were attempting to do a doctoral dissertation. Contributing new ideas to scholarship is the whole point of getting a doctorate. Unfortunately it’s not the point of a term paper. The point of a term paper is coming to understand other people’s knowlege. I ended up doing something more workable–a look at the demographics of who supports and who opposes euthanasia and comparing them to the predictions of sociological theory.

Euthanasia in Non-Industrial Societies
I won’t go into that here, but in the process of doing research I ran across an anthropologist’s article about issues surrounding human control of death. At the time, I found it interesting that non-industrial societies sometimes handled life and death in a very ruthless (if practical) way. Babies that made it hard for the tribe to survive were starved to death. Older people whose physical handicaps consumed too many resources were murdered, sometimes with their consent.

We don’t presently live that close to the edge of survival. We live in an age of relative plenty.

Modern Issues in Life and Death
For us the question isn’t “Will the effort of taking care of ‘Old Uncle John’ doom us to starvation this winter?” It is usually a question that’s more philosophical. We end up asking “Is this person alive or dead? Does turning off this machine end a charade of life or does it murder a living being?”

Oddly enough, we aren’t the first people to ever be in this situation. Death has been a subtle distinction from life for much of human history. In the past, of course, death was the more likely answer in cases of doubt. Lifesigns could easily go beneath a human’s ability to detect. It was possible to bury a living person and not realize it. On the other hand, someone whose lifesigns were that faint was unlikely to be healed at that level of technology.

One difference between the past and the present is that past societies often reached some sort of consensus about what death is, giving them a point at which they could stop worrying about a persons’s survival and move on to the process of grieving. Thanks to modern technology, however, we’ve opened up the process of death into a series of questions.

We can stop the process to a degree, giving a temporary resting point, potentially allowing people the time to heal, but also potentially uselessly delaying the inevitable.

And our well-intentioned medical professionals can only quote probabilities about what’s going to happen. They don’t really know for sure the results of this particular case.

Reaching a Modern Consensus
Thus the whole question moves out of science and into personal beliefs. Can you live with not giving this person who you love a week? Years? How long? At what point are you willing to give up? Are you ever willing to give up?

I suspect that our society will reach a level of knowlege and accumulate a series of traditions surrounding situations similar to Terry Schiavo’s, but we haven’t yet. Until we reach some sort of cultural consensus about the technological options surrounding death, we’ll be seeing families’ private struggles in the headlines.

Hopefully their struggles will help clarify the issues we face and bring us forward into clarity, but I’d rather they not have to face such tragic choices.

Posted by Jim at March 18th, 2005

Readers of this blog may have noticed that writing on this blog has slowed to a trickle over the last few weeks.

Here’s why…

GRACE, one of the organizations that I work for runs a conference called Summit on Racism. Summit on Racism does more than simply talk about how bad racism is. It’s far too easy to talk about racism and do nothing except talk.

The Summit on Racism model includes on-going action teams that work throughout the year. What they do ranges from forming a team (of judges, lawyers, police, etc…) for assisting people who have experienced racial incidents, trying to get local businesses to sign on to examine how they hire (or fail to hire) minorities, actively contacting local media about how they portray minorities, and a lot of other things that I’m unaware of.

It’s gotten a certain amount of attention over the years. We’ve had people from other states attend with an eye toward reimplementing it. I know for sure that it’s been used in Holland, Kalamazoo, and (in the near future) Battle Creek. During the Clinton administration, we actually had regular contact with the White House about it.

I haven’t been involved in the direct action portion of Summit. I do the infrastructure–that is to say that I make sure all the registrations get into GRACE’s database somehow.

As recently as two years ago this meant physically entering registrations into the database. There is nothing quite like entering 800 registrations into a database to really make you dread coming to work.

Last year, fortunately, we went to an all electronic registration system. Enter your data into a form on our web page, pay via Paypal, and you’re all done. Well, you’re all done if Paypal actually decides to take your credit card (which it won’t ncessarily even if the card’s perfectly good). I could go on about that, but that’s another blog entry.

Nonetheless, web page entry really is better. I don’t have to puzzle through people’s handwriting for one thing. Also, due to the fact that everyone else has done the data entry, I only have to worry about getting the information out of the database so that the leadership team can make decisions about how much food to buy or rooms to use.

That doesn’t stop me from doing the occasional 14 hour day, but it’s better than doing a couple weeks of 10-12 hour days.

On the day of Summit on Racism my duties totally change. With all the reports printed out, I have only one thing left to do–photography. As the unofficial photographer of Summit on Racism, I’ve pulled out my cameras for 6 Summits now. This year is the first year I’ve used digital in addition to film.

I can’t say that the pictures are better or worse, but they’re certainly up on our web page sooner. I can pick up the film today, but I’ve already put a few of the digital pictures up on the web site. I’ll hopefully rearrange things to look a bit nicer (and include more pictures) come Monday, but I’m overall happy with digital photograpy at the moment.

On thing though… Thanks to the darkness of the venue, I ended up using the flash a lot, draining the battery only halfway through the event. Had I relied entirely on the digital camera we would have missed the keynote speaker.

Nonetheless, I think things went well. And even if they didn’t, I’m still incredibly relieved to be done with this for the year–and looking forward to next year.

Posted by Jim at March 17th, 2005

Cake is one of those bands that I do like, but haven’t quite gotten around to buying one of their albums. For what it’s worth, Terry Gross of NPR interviewed Cake’s lead singer/guitarist back in November of 2004. I meant to blog about it a while ago, but didn’t get around to that either.

Take a listen…

Posted by Jim at March 15th, 2005

I don’t regard myself to be a liberal (or conservative), but I definitely don’t regard liberalism to be the source of all evil (or good).

While looking for something else, I ran across a website that appears to list cities, rating them on their friendliness (or lack thereof) to liberal ideas.

Reading the entries makes me think that most of them are at least 4 years old and overstate the level of hostility. In the most recent presidential election, Kent County swung Democratic, something that made a friend of mine (who’s on the executive committee of Kent County’s Democratic party) very happy. He’s hoping to make it a trend.

Whatever the case, though I’m willing to entertain ideas from both the right and the left, I’m not particularly wild about websites that make the other side sound evil. Pointing out the other side’s faults is fine, but I tend to draw the line at generalizations about a large group’s personal qualities.

Whether the Grand Rapids entry commits that particular error is something I leave up to the reader.

Posted by Jim at March 14th, 2005

If you follow the comments on my post about buying a laptop, you’ll find that Michael Hall recommended a good deal from Powermax, a Mac reseller. I then ordered it and discovered that the iBook in question had already been bought but not updated on the website.

They wrote back to tell me this late Sunday night and gave some other options, all of which were similar, but ultimately more expensive in that I still would have to buy an airport and memory upgrade. Thus, I cancelled my order via email.

Owing to the fact that I wanted to make abolutely sure that my cancellation was received (or more to the point, that my credit card was not charged), I called them this morning. It turned out that they were willing to upgrade one of their other laptops and sell it to me at the same price as I was going to pay earlier.

Very cool.

Posted by Jim at March 12th, 2005

I mentioned earlier that I had ordered an iPod Shuffle. I received it early Wednesday morning–one of the great benefits of telecommuting being that you can be there when the Fedex guy arrives.

I bought the 1GB shuffle instead of the 512MB, largely because I’ve never been in a situation with electronics in which I’ve ever wished for less memory, but often been in situations in which I’ve wished for more. I chose the Shuffle as opposed to the mini or the original iPod largely because I enjoy running and doing things outdoors. The Shuffle’s less likely to be damaged in the process.

Secondarily, I thought it might be nice to use it for sitting and listening to music, but since I work at home, I’ve got access to my stereo and entire music library and didn’t see that as a necessity.

Here are some observations now that I’ve used it for a few days:
–When you’re on a busy street passing vehicle noise tends to take out the bass and drums unless you turn up the volume pretty loud. Too be fair, this can happen with car stereos too.
–iTunes is much more pleasant to deal with when ripping mp3’s than Realplayer.
–The Shuffle integrates well with iTunes. Moving music around is surprisingly easy.
–Downloading (via iPodder) podcasts is pretty easy to do as well.
–1GB holds a lot of mp3’s. Though I know that other mp3 players hold more music, I can’t imagine myself listening to an mp3 player long enough (18 hours) to hear all the music more than once and thus I don’t feel like I’m going to have to upgrade any time soon.
–Differing mp3 volumes can be a bit of a pain when you’re outside. Classical music (with it’s greater dynamic range) is particularly bad for this. You can be listening to the Wallflowers, happily hearing every single note and then suddenly there’s no music and you find yourself wondering whether the player still works. It does, but now it’s playing a soft part of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” At that point you pump up the volume and soon after that the music SWELLS to ear pounding levels of pain. Again, I have this happen in the car too.

That’s one thing I remember from being a DJ back in college. I constantly had to watch the sound level when playing classical on the air because it would dip under the point at which people could actually hear.

And then you’ve got dead air, a cardinal sin even in college radio.

More observations:
–Listening to music in random order does revitalize certain albums for me. I’ve listened to certain cd’s in my collection much too often. I still like the music, even love the music in some cases, but I just can’t bear to play the album straight through. Oddly enough, music from that same album following a piece from a completely different cd is something I can enjoy.
–As for the much pointed out fact that the Shuffle has no display… I agree and disagree. When I’m sitting down listening to music, I sometimes find myself thinking that I wish I knew what song I was listening to. When I’m running outside or (as of this morning) shoveling snow, I have no need to look at the display. Bearing in mind that I bought the Shuffle for doing things outside, I can deal with the lack of display.

At the moment, I’m happy to have bought it. We’ll see what I think in a few weeks.

Posted by Jim at March 10th, 2005

There are two things one might do with a tax refund. The responsible one seems likely to be saving it or investing it somehow. The other, more likely option is spending it on something cool. For the last few years, I’ve been doing the former option, using the refund for something responsible even though I’ve had the money necessary to buy a particularly cool digital camera. This year, I’m thinking of spending the money on something.

Alas, not the camera.

Over Christmas, Kristen and I got a digital camera. Not, I might add, the professional level digital camera I’ve often considered buying, but a good enough camera that I no longer feel a burning need to indulge my urge to buy something that I may never use to it’s full potential.

I understand the basics of photography and have even done some paid work on occasion, but I’m not a professional or even particularly close to that level of skill.

Thus, I’m tempted to buy something that I will use: a notebook of some kind.

I’m tempted to buy either a refurbished Dell notebook and install Linux on it or possibly to buy a notebook from Linare, the company that provides Linux notebooks to Walmart. With the latter option I’d initially avoid the possible pain of getting all devices working and thus just be able to use the notebook.

I say initially because the likelihood of my eventually installing Debian over the Linare distribution of Linux is pretty high. At that point, all the time saved by buying a new notebook with a pre-loaded operating system will disappear.

Alternately, I’m also considering buying a used or reconditioned iBook (a G3/900mhz or similar G4). That would again save me the hassle of OS installation at the cost of running an older notebook that will become obsolete sooner (making it possible that I would end up installing Linux on it…).

Buying an iBook would also allow me to test my web design on Mac IE and Safari, something that would be pretty useful. Not to mention Javascript. For the most part I’m inclined not to bother getting Javascript to work in Safari or Konqueror, but I’d like to have it fail gracefully if it must fail. Thus, it’d be nice to have a test box.

Either one seems likely to have wireless cards available (an absolute requirement for a notebook in my opinion), but the Mac will cost more. Of course, the quality of Linare is an open question. I still haven’t seen any reviews of their stuff.

Anyone have any advice on this one?